Sun Unveils 64-bit Server Line

SumDog is one of many to let us know, PC World is reporting that Sun is expected to reveal the first few of their new 64-bit servers at their quarterly product rollout. From the article: "Formerly code-named Galaxy, the Sun Fire X2100, X4100, and X4200 servers represent the company's bid to woo customers, particularly the financial industry sector, away from rival server vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell."

And it's based on Opterons...

[Anonymous Coward]

The future of 64-bit Sun servers is the Opteron.

Should we take this as the final sign that Sun is giving up on Sparc?

And as they move toward "normal" chips, should we expect that Sun will be able to continue to offer the hardware advantages (say, to do with reliability) that they held with Sparc, or are we going to be seeing them move closer to being a plain-box Opteron reseller-- in the same way that as Apple is moving to plain-jane x86, they are also giving up on technologies such as Open Firmware?

Sun is not giving up on SPARC

[turgid]

Sun has a comprehensive roadmap for UltraSPARC going forward and combining forces with Fujutsu on SPARC64.

These new servers absolutely rock, and at superb prices.

I once had the pleasure of a 4-way Opteron v40z with a development version of 64-bit Solaris 10. It was a screamer, especially compared to our 4-way Dell P4 Xeon box, and 64-bit.

It was plenty fast enough to host 4 zones and several developers working on KDE, gcc and all manner of other stuff.

At last, Sun looks like it's turning the corner (despite the best efforts of some of its PHBs - no names mentioned).

Good luck Sun.

Re:And it's based on Opterons...

[bradleycarpenter]

There are not white boxes, they are in house boxes built from the ground up Andy Bechtolsheim. Supposedly sun is working on a 8 socket box...thus you could have 16 opterons cores running in one box. Very interesting future for Opteron and Sun.

Let's hope they run better than the W2100z WS

[jasonmicron]

Let's hope that they run better than the W2100z workstations. Dual Opteron 250 processors and 16 gigs of RAM (at least the model that my company bought) and all we have had so far is horrendous problems.

4 BIOS updates later and the problems have dwindled a bit but we constantly get BSP error messages on boot up and random DIMM error messages during POST (on both sockets and chips that have been thoroughly tested and known to be good). Daughter processor cards have been bad as well (already replaced 4 in a batch of 40 which, according to Sun is "acceptable rate of failure").

Their latest BIOS update (version R01_B4_S2, released last month) does resolve the frequency of some of these errors but now we have machines that lock up on that BIOS release but not previous ones.

I only post this because the chips are Opteron 250s by AMD (64-bit) and the main board is another AMD.

Based on my experience with these workstations I wouldn't touch anything put out by Sun until they can get a quality control department set up and running anything with AMD chips.

Re:I love the bit in the article

[bradleycarpenter]

Um, they are opteron servers. They run Windows/Linux fine, and any other OS that works on x86. In fact Sun now has a support contract that provides windows support.

Re:Sun 10 years from now

[ehovland]

> Do slashdot readers see Sun being relevant 10 years from now?

It depends on whether you think Sun is turning the corner with these new servers. The original opteron line was basically a company on life support getting pretty much reference models out the door. While these machines show Sun's polish all over it. I think these servers compete well with HP and Dell's offering and they have Sun's polish. I am hopeful. But ten years is a long time from now.

> Will they survive by selling 'mostly' software?

Huh? This is a server line that runs Solaris or Linux. They are definitely still selling hardware and giving away the operating system.

> I know they sell hardware, but they no longer control the full stack like IBM with POWER.

Sun has almost never had control over the full stack. They sold you the hardware with a free (as in beer) operating system on it. Then you put on the application/server software. They might help you buy that application/server software. But they have never made it.

Microsoft Windows is fully supported by Sun, too

[assantisz]

Sun also offers full technical support for Microsoft Windows on their hardware. See this [sun.com] for more info.

Re:Sun 10 years from now

[njcoder]

" Do slashdot readers see Sun being relevant 10 years from now? Will they survive by selling 'mostly' software? I know they sell hardware, but they no longer control the full stack like IBM with POWER. Just a question."

Huh? This story is about a new line of servers and youq uestion if sone is selling mostly software!?!?! And you get modded interesting. I think it's pretty interesting that someone thinks it's a valid question.

These boxes are completely designed by Sun. Though the CPU is not manufactured by them they work together closely with AMD on the chip.

There's a good interview with Andy Bechtolsheim [eweek.com] that includes some of the details between the AMD/Sun relationship concerning opteron.

hey no offense, but...

[mihalis]

you're wrong on every point. Seriously!

Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux

Actually, these new machines run Solaris, Linux and Windows - they are even on WHQL. They are the second-gen of Sun's AMD based x86-64 machines, and there were some intel x86-32 based systems before that, so arguably they are on their 3d or 4th gen of machines which can run Windows, if you like.

Compare and contrast this with Sun and HP who basically say "service, hey, you bought it, the check cleared and if it stops working then come see us about a service contract (which we will charge you up the wazoo for)".

Sun always quotes multiple service contract prices right there on the web page when you order the hardware (different levels of service).

Re:64-bitness

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

SunFire V20z (2 socket) and SunFire V40z (4 socket) are AMD Opteron.

These new SunFire x4x00 servers are the FIRST SUN DESIGNED Opteron boxes.

Re:No, no, no, no.

[HairyCanary]

Didn't RTFA did ya? When they say they're paying attention to Wall Street, they don't mean as investors. They mean Wall Street as customers.

Re:I love the bit in the article

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

The biggest problem I foresee for Sun in competing with Dell is simple, Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux

are you on crack?
The Galaxy boxes run Solaris, Linux, or Windoze.
The current Opterons do as well.
RTFA.

why is gross misinformation being modded up as Interesting???

Re:I love the bit in the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... sun's do run windows and linux, and we've been seeing a huge influx at my place of employment of support calls for sun boxes that are running everything under the sun (excuse the pun.. and the rhyming). Anyways, at least from my small sample study, Sun is making a lot of headway with these opteron servers, and I mean a LOT... calls for dell based machines has tanked and sun has taken their spot. This is fibre channel related support btw, so it's in the large business/enterprise.

X4100 Review at InfoWorld

[PCM2]

InfoWorld also got an early look at the X4100, [infoworld.com] though the review doesn't specify that model number because it hadn't even been announced yet. The price tag is ten times more than that of the X2100 the parent mentions, but as far as I understand it, the X2100 is pretty much an Asian white-box system. It's the X4100 and X4200 systems, a 1U and 2U respectively, that are Sun's new flagship custom designs. The big news is that InfoWorld's reviewers actually seem to have some fairly complementary things to say about them, which hasn't always been the case for Sun's AMD hardware in the past.

Re:No, no, no, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what the quote means-- although I see your confusion. He's trying to say that: "We're trying to address the technology needs of Wall Street customers." Selling to large ($100M+ USD per year in Sun sales) Wall Street companies is one of Sun's traditional strengths-- this includes Wall Street infrastructure players, who have nothing to do with recommending stocks. Those companies have large and sophisticated IT organizations with worldwide reach. I'm sure there is consideration of a "halo effect"-- if your boxes power Wall Street, then Wall Street will be good to you. But I think that's pretty secondary.

Re:Let's hope they run better than the W2100z WS

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

Let's hope that they run better than the W2100z workstations.

They should... they are entirely different boxes. The new ones are from the acquisition of Kealia (Andy Bechtolsheim's startup).

Re:Sun 10 years from now

[websaber]

You would not believe how much sun junk financial companies have lying around. I am talking about I have worked in companies were they have racks and racks of maxed out 4500's (the ram alone can cost 20g) running a single process at low utilization. The advantage of sun is that they are the only company that has a unified industrial grade hardware /software system so financial companies will pay thru the nose for that peace of mind. One admin told me that the only reason they really still use sun is because that it pipes input and output thru the serial port from the second power is turned on. You can give all the TCO arguments in the world no body is going to care if they have to explain to the CEO why a billion dollar (Literally) transaction failed because two vendors blamed each other for a mistake. Until a Linux company REALLY gets it there will always be room for sun.

Re:Let's hope they run better than the W2100z WS

[Zemplar]

Strange. I've got a W2100z myself (dual 246's) and have been nothing but impressed by the hardware. I've run Solaris 10, Linux, and Windows XP on the hardware and each performed as good as can be expected for each OS; as each OS has it's own characteristics.

Airplane circling Dell with a message from Sun

[Captain BooBoo]

There is a small plane that has been flying around and around the Dell campus with a huge banner saying " Sun has x64 servers...WATCH OUT DELL! Its funny...the plane has been flying around for well over an hour now.

Re:How about 64 bit java?

[farble1670]

sun has produce 64-bit JVMs [sun.com] for quite some time. i don't know the exact java version where that support entered, but it's been around as long as i can remember.

is this what you meant?

Re:Spells Death for the SPARC

[ValourX]

Opterons were not designed to go above 8 parallel CPUs. SPARC/POWER/IA64 systems, two of which are RISC and one of which is VLIW, were designed for massively parallel computing. That they are used in lower-end 1 and 2-CPU systems doesn't diminish the fact that they can do much more.

When I typed the original message I forgot about Itanium2, so being RISC is not a prerequisite for massively parallel systems. All of the above are superscalar designs.

-Jem

Re:Spells Death for the SPARC

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot Sun *currently* has 8 core CPUs, Intel and AMD both just got dual core.

Tell me how someone that far ahead of the game is doomed.

UltraSPARC was not the first 64-bit CPU.

[emil]

They were definitely preceeded by the DEC Alpha.

Re:Spells Death for the SPARC

[SQL Error]

Wrong.

The Opteron supports glueless 8-chip systems. Just wire the HyperTransport links together and off you go. Of course, with dual-core that's already 16 CPUs, and will be 32 CPUs next year. And it's quite possible to add bridge chips to support more than 8 Opterons.

All of the above are superscalar designs.

Including the Opteron.